Dec 20, 2009
“The Hollow Men” is both a single hundred-line poem and a sequence of five poems (or parts). Although almost entirely lacking in simple narrative cohesiveness and linear development, and defying simple classification (“The Hollow Men” is at once dramatic monologue, soliloquy, choric ode, lyric, elegy, and meditation), T. S. Eliot’s highly and at times allegorically abstract text nevertheless achieves a remarkable unity of effect in terms of voice, mood, and imagery. The simplicity and seeming transparency of the title—a conflation of William Shakespeare’s...
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